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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29196726">a grounded guide to flying (wish you hated me)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryter/pseuds/ryter'>ryter</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>SBI characterization fics to cry about [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Aftermath, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Biblical Imagery (Abrahamic Religions), Brotherly Angst, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family, Family Dynamics, Family Feels, Father-Son Relationship, Fatherhood, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Ghost Wilbur Soot, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Moving On, Parent Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Sad Parental Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Sleepy Bois Inc Angst, Sleepy Bois Inc as Family, War, Wilbur Soot and Technoblade and TommyInnit are Siblings, Wingfic, Wings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:22:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,001</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29196726</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryter/pseuds/ryter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil is a saviour before a soldier. He tries his best, picking children up in need of love, mercy to those he can spare and quickness to those he cannot. In every world except this one, Phil finds someone to save.<br/>No one saves Phil.</p><p>Or: flying is overrated. Phil was never a saint.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF) &amp; Everyone, Toby Smith | Tubbo &amp; Wilbur Soot &amp; Technoblade &amp; TommyInnit &amp; Phil Watson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>SBI characterization fics to cry about [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2084016</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>158</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>a grounded guide to flying (wish you hated me)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This work focuses on the characters within the Dream SMP roleplay and not the content creators themselves.<br/>Most of this one-shot should be understandable even if you haven't read the other fics in the series, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to take a look at the rest due to some references.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The downside of wings is the weight. Aching shoulders, pain running down thoughts and tendons, pinning you to the ground. Too heavy to stretch out, let alone to catch updrifts. Flying was never about feathers—it was about something else entirely. Hollowness, maybe. Brittle bones, ready to snap, but light enough to survive wind.</p><p>Phil looks up at the passing birds, wings staked into the soil, and feels his back breaking.</p><p>#</p><p>They come in the night.</p><p>The only boy he raised he doesn’t call <em>son </em>out of sick loyalty to the man that asked him for help, when Tubbo was still small enough to spend the night asleep in someone’s arms. Cigarette smoke clung to baby clothes and horns peaked out of dirty hair, the taste of whiskey on his tiny fingers. Tubbo refused to call him anything other than <em>Mr. Phil. </em>Once, Phil respected that.</p><p>His grandson, crimson on his muzzle, teeth gleaming from the light of torches. A long tongue slips through the cracks of sharpened canines, wiggling like a mimicry of laughter. Fundy’s ears are pinned back to his skull and his eyes are black, beady like dots on a mask, whooping and hollering threats to the skies above.</p><p><em>You’re fucking dead to me, </em>Phil tells them, and pretends that it’s true.</p><p>Part of Phil hates Quackity the most, wants to make every change in his family the fault of this stranger who came in and turned the world upside down. He wants to blame Quackity for the coldness in Tubbo’s voice, the way Fundy sharpens his claws. He wants to pin Quackity to the ground and tear him apart.</p><p>They leave as they came, cheering in bloody victory, and Phil lays on the floor of his once-safe house and lets the tears trickle down into his hair.</p><p>#</p><p>Another downside of wings is the range. Stretch out, now. Lift your arms above your head. Fingers, too, toes curling, limbs shaking. Wait until it’s painful, until your heart is pounding against your ribs, until you feel like a guitar string being tuned, vibrating with the wonder of being tense and alive.</p><p>Phil sleeps on his wings. He uses them as shields and as blankets, bumps into the trees he walks past. His feet ache at the end of every night, but not as much as the rest of his body. He counts bones to go to sleep—radius, ulna, metacarpals. They are solid and heavy underneath his fingertips. To have marrow is a betrayal.</p><p>He spread his wings, once. When his son reached out to press that button, face lined with euphoria, Phil did his best. He took his wings and wrapped them around his boy, their bodies, like Wilbur was still a child crawling into bed and whispering of night terrors. He keeps the body safe even as he takes a sword into his hands and his palms stain crimson, wings bruised and bleeding like a storm, the smell of acrid feathers lingering in the back of his throat.</p><p>Phil wakes up with wings dead from weight and scabbed from sorrow, his feet aching with the knowledge of the path ahead.</p><p>#</p><p><em>You were my friend and you betrayed us,</em> Tommy screams, chasm growing underneath him.</p><p><em>Don’t speak to me of loyalty,</em> Techno screams, tusks growing past his eyes.</p><p>Phil closes his eyes, wings pinned to his back and green behind him, the edge of the obsidian blocks a step away. In his ender chest, there are two pieces of blue next to an emerald.</p><p>He knows, distantly, that he would be stopped. Dream would teleport him back, or Tommy and Techno would snap their jaws shut and leap forward to catch him, misplaced loyalty still at the core of everything they were. Even Ghostbur would spring to action, placing water before Phil could hit the ground.</p><p>Maybe they wouldn’t, his voices whisper. They’d all expect him to spread his wings, wouldn’t they? Wings stolen from a dragon, gold in a chest, fire breathing from his lungs.</p><p>He isn’t a saint. He’s the beast of legends past.</p><p>He keeps walking.</p><p>#</p><p>When it comes down to it, Phil is a protector. He plucks Techno out of fights, gives Wilbur something to fiddle with and control the outcome of, pushes Tommy in the directions of friends to shout and scream with. He is a saviour before he is a soldier, ignoring the bloody tracks he leaves behind him, sparing those he can and bringing mercy to those he cannot.</p><p>“Yes,” Techno says, words short and brimming with layers when he gets asked if Phil is a good father. “Of course,” Wilbur says, lanky hair flopping in his face, voice lilting with a hidden rhythm when he gets asked the same. “You son of a bitch, I’ll fight you,” Tommy shouts, war-ready and sword at his hip, fists ready to defend, furious at the implication Phil somehow isn’t good.</p><p>Phil looks at all three of his sons with something like regret burning in his chest, wishing they hated him.</p><p>#</p><p>When Ghostbur shouts at Phil over the destruction of houses, under the obsidian latticework, <em>you knew Friend was in your house, </em>it’s like spreading his wings out again. <em>You knew everything everyone owned was in this town, </em>and it’s currents tugging at his feathers. You can be a martyr without being a saint.</p><p><em>I sowed the seeds of peace and yet I’m the one who pays for war, </em>the remains of his son scream at him, forgotten bones laying somewhere in the dirt, and Phil has a direction for the hate he wants to feel.</p><p>Moments later, Ghostbur calls again, voice ringing sweeter than the church bells housing whatever is left of St. George, and Phil remembers what it’s like to fall.</p><p>#</p><p>In one world, Techno cannot see. He squints to make out shapes and the voices chant a mantra inside his head, <em>keep your brothers safe, stay alive, </em>pit swallowing him whole. Phil wraps a blindfold around his own eyes and teaches his oldest son how to fight, better alive and bloody than dead.</p><p>In another word, Fundy dies before he learns how to hate his father. Wilbur spits blood on Schlatt’s suit, in the winding tunnels below their nations, tears falling onto the stone floors. Phil waits for Wilbur to move back into L’Manburg before knocking, using his wings to hold his middle son close, helping him through the grief of a father losing his son.</p><p>In yet another world, Tommy remembers the campsites of days lost to time. He talks with a heart of gold, picks apple seeds out of his teeth like Persephone, burning under the dying sun. Phil comes back with three sleeping bags and driftwood in his arms to call his youngest son home.</p><p>(In one world, Tubbo has L’Manburg in his head, and never once thinks of Phil.)</p><p>In this world, Phil saves no one. He watches his oldest son stand trial, skull knitting back together like Withers in the air. He forces his blade through his middle son, forcing through muscle and scraping against bone, vibrations shaking him like nails on a chalkboard. He looks down at his youngest son and tears the world apart and calls it a <em>message</em>.</p><p>There is no world where his sons try to save Phil.</p><p>#</p><p>He tries. He bandages his wings with clumsy hands, keeping them tightly shut to hide gaping wounds. It goes around broken bones like a snake, tightening and twisting, pain lancing up his back. Sometimes it feels like pulling himself together, and he makes them tighter deliberately, just to feel the singing in his blood.</p><p>Ghostbur asks to be revived, so he pulls his sword out again and again, slaying the dragon, reciting scriptures on totems and second chances. The latter, he convinces himself that he says it for Ghostbur, for the smallest chance his real son is somewhere deep inside, and not for himself.</p><p>#</p><p>There is a campsite. White tents encircle a blue fire. Driftwood, flames lapping up salt and dry kelp like a hunger. The ocean is calm next to them, a black memory, crawling up against the rounded rocks.</p><p>Technoblade tussles with Fundy. It’s a joyful kind of brawl, Fundy still learning to use words instead of growls, how to move the teeth in his jaw and twist his tongue into speaking like a human has to. He’s the size of Techno’s two fists pressed together, but Fundy bristles with ease and nips at war-torn fingers. Techno is hesitant, tusks curving past his eyes and nails long, but there’s an undercurrent of satisfaction as he lets his nephew teach him how to play.</p><p>Wilbur sits next to the fire. His guitar is in his hands, wood stained lovingly, initials carved into the neck. His eyes are half-lidded even as he keeps Fundy in his sight, trust painted on his face. Chords strum themselves into the falling night, soft and gentle, like the unbreaking waves.</p><p>Tommy splashes Tubbo. They’re lanky, growing too fast, energy brimming underneath their skin even as Tubbo pushes his hair away from his eyes. Their knobbly knees knock together as they sit on the shore, shoulders brushing, brothers chosen and changing in the cover of night.</p><p>The Phil of times long past watches them all fondly, young and lazy, satisfied with his life.</p><p>The Phil of times now happening remains frozen in the memory, screaming curses as tears make tracks down his sun-worn cheeks, old and tired and desperate for the moments when his little family still made sense.</p><p>#</p><p>He is always cold. His footsteps are marked by a trail of shedding feathers, melted primaries and crackling tufts of down. Pollux on his shoulders, Icarus above his head, tearing him apart from the inside. The Greeks made their own dragons, called them spite and pity, entwined them in a never-ending oubliette of guilt.</p><p>He wakes to his breath frosting in the air. Maybe it’s smoke.</p><p>#</p><p>In this world, Wilbur doesn’t use his final breaths for jokes between friends. There is a meaning to the afterlife, and Wilbur grips it like a white flag.</p><p><em>I’m proud of you, </em>he tells Tommy, and leaves before Tommy admits to half-desperate plans of bringing him back.</p><p><em>I understand, </em>he tells Techno, and crops of potatoes freeze over without Techno ever noticing.</p><p><em>I hope you can forgive me, </em>he tells Fundy, and ears prick up for the first time in three months.</p><p>Phil gets the sharp intake of breath. Fingertips made of ice part through newly-grown feathers, red flakes falling off like a resurrection. He closes his eyes, leaning into the light touch.</p><p><em>You did what you could, </em>Wilbur murmurs, and tears freeze in Phil’s hair. He stands alone in the cold emptiness with a piece of blue in his hand and a distant memory ringing in his ears.</p><p>#</p><p>There is one future where it works out.</p><p>Tubbo and Tommy spend nights on their bench, listening to music and sharing snippets of thoughts and realization. Techno stammers out something close enough to an apology for Tommy to take it, and Tommy does the same over grandiose speeches and golden apples in his fists.</p><p>Wilbur is allowed to rest, in this future. It is not a happy future, this one where things fit together like lost puzzle pieces. There is no Ghostbur to bring cruel remembrance, no blue to fit in their pockets. Wilbur is allowed to be at peace, but first, he brings peace to his family.</p><p>Phil wraps his healing wings around his boys and stares into the flickering fire, the bruises underneath his eyes thrown into harsh relief. It burns in his gut, licking up his sides and out his throat. A funeral pyre for his thoughts. He’s forgetting how it feels to be cold.</p><p>We’re not there, yet, but we might get there eventually. Spite and Pity, they called dragons. We can choose to call ours Hope.</p><p>Phil watches over what’s left of his family until the sun comes back up.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The end of an era. </p><p>I'm not going to add new works to this series. Another series, maybe one day in the future. But this one is done. So many of you have read everything I ever posted, have left comments telling me about people you've shared this with or lines that you kept coming back to. It's more than I ever expected and it's brought me through truly dark times.<br/>To those reading these notes: if you are in a dark place, I hope your sun rises. Thank you for reading.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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